ROW80 – Linda Nelson

It’s been a while since I wrote any fiction. I have about five unfinished manuscripts at various stages that I started over the past five years. This month I decided to pull out of the mothballs and commit to working on that one story every night with a minimum of 100 words.

Tonight I was 26 words under 5oo which is more than I had expected to write during that hour.

Finding time to write these days is hard.

No, wait, that is an excuse.

There have been some nights where I just sat at the screen and stared it down doing nothing but surfing Facebook and Twitter.

Some of the textbooks that I have to read for school are so boring that I find myself nodding off within a half hour of sitting down to read. There is still one and a half years left until I have my Bachelor degree and another year after that for my MBA. Going back to school was the most wished for item on my bucket list since graduating high school 35 years ago.

One month left until I will be attending my first college graduation. Five years after graduating high school, I had given up hope of ever returning to school for that degree. Instead, I got married and had two wonderful children. College became the forgotten dream. I had a pretty good paying job back then anyway, or so I thought. Each time I found another job, my income continued to decline instead of rising. I never made the connection until being forced from my job because of the economic conditions. No one would hire me at my age. Phiff!

Hard work has gotten me to where I am today with my education, and I remind myself I only have a couple of years left until I am back to writing three hours a day.

Until then, one hour can either give me a hundred words or five hundred words. If I get lucky, a Nano word count would be nice.

[media-credit id=1 align=”aligncenter” width=”300″][/media-credit]I love old farmhouses, I think they are a treasure to have. They have nooks and crannies, giving lots of storage space. We lived in such a house several years back, which we rented.
This house had four bedrooms or three with a library, a three-season sun porch, a kitchen that stayed cold year round. I miss the garden plot we had. Apple trees, pears, crabapple, and grapes grew on the property. Across the street, we had our own swimming area on the Black Water River.
I regretted the day we had to move. It’s a shame we didn’t buy the place. It was bad enough, my daughter had to change schools. She had just made new friends and was doing so well in school. At the time, we didn’t think we could afford to buy the place.
We had deer, moose, turkeys and bears walking about our yard. It was neat the day the deer was close to the house, That was the day, my daughter stepped out the back door of the garage and was within a couple of feet of them. They stayed there until she moved quickly to wave to us in the window. Then the scooted off.
The bear bent our rod-iron shepherd hook holding our birdfeeder. It never dawned on us that there were bears in the area, even though there was this huge pile of dung in the back yard. I just thought that someone had a big dog on the loose.
When the moose came to visit, it was early morning. I would have taken a picture of it, but I was afraid it would be gone before I returned with the camera. It had blocked the living room window at eight o’clock in the morning. It was funny how it investigated my daughter’s trampoline as though it were going to climb up on it and take a nap.
Those were the days, almost ten years ago. We’ve been living with Mom ever since. Someday, we’re going to find another house like that one. Or maybe we will build one.
Just a future dream after retirement. By then, I’ll have new dreams to look forward to.

ROW80:

Not much to report. I did add 2k words to the manuscript on Sunday. I think I’m just about done with the first act. It does need more, but it’s the first draft, so I’ll go back to those chapters later and hash them out some more. Right now, I’m just trying to figure out the bare bones. I have some conflict, but I don’t think I’ve created enough. I see plot holes popping up every where too. (sigh)

I’m sure I won’t get too much done this Saturday. My RWA meetings are starting back up . This weekend, our speaker is Michelle Bourassa, a certified professional coach who will be talking about “Getting it D.O.N.E.”. It will be interesting to see how motivated I will be after the meeting. Who knows, maybe I’ll be looking at one of those 5k word days on Sunday.

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Enough of me!

How’s your writing going this week?

Read any new books lately?